Hello, fellow Housewives viewers! Your intrepid recapper Karen Valby is out this week – she’s off finding her spiritual center with Kim in Ojai (or something like that) – so I’m stepping in. I can’t promise that I’ll be as funny or smart as Karen, but, like poor Ken Vanderpump trying to ignore a cameraman filming his exposed upper thigh on a surgery table, I will do my very best!

Kyle and Mauricio kicked off the episode feeling proud of their daughter, Alexia. She had, after all, passed her permit test on the third try and even parallel parked just four feet away from the curb one time. Truly impressive stuff. So the next logical thing to do was clearly to buy her a Benz. While Alexia’s reaction was admittedly appreciative – “I’m gonna cry right now. I’m gonna cry,” she repeated, not crying, with her manicured hand covering her mouth – it’s moments like this one that remind me that, as down-to-earth and funny as Kyle can be, she’s hardly a relatable 53 percenter. The woman likes flaunting her wealth – sometimes in the form of shiny new sports cars, and sometimes in the form of over-sized hairbrushes.

While the Richards family called a street cleaning company to scrape the dried eggs off their driveway (I never figured out if that was an actual prank or not), Brandi grabbed lunch with her gay book agent, who seems to be angling to become the Miss Lawrence/Dwight/Rosie of the Beverly Hills franchise. Brandi lamented that none of the other ladies seemed very congratulatory when she announced her book deal over dinner at Ojai. “Be happy for me all you rich people,” she said, rather endearingly, in her confessional. “You already have money. Let me get a little!” Brandi probably said other endearing things, too, but I didn’t notice because I was so distracted by her lips, which looked bigger, faker, and glossier than ever before — a truly impressive feat on the Real Housewives. In fact, I’m fairly certain that all the ladies made a pact with each other to get their collagen injections at the same time (“If we all suddenly have bigger lips, then no one will notice!”) because everyone’s mouth seemed to be stuck somewhere between duckface and blow-up doll last night. Am I right?

Next it was time to meet Jax, the well-coiffed server at Lisa’s restaurant, Sur. There he was laying out plates. And there he was polishing champagne flutes. And there he was addressing Lisa seriously, with a single greased curl dangling from his pomped-up quiff. At first I wondered why the show kept focusing on this Jax guy, but then I realized what I was actually watching: an extended preview of Bravo’s new spinoff Vanderpump Rules, which, as far as I can tell, is about a promiscuous, sexy waiting staff drowning in a sea of pink camellia petals, rosé, and ambition. Think The Hills as directed by Shonda Rhines, plus British accents! The whole segment was pretty unnecessary, but watching Lisa scold a beautiful server named Stassi, who had apparently angered a very important Hollywood customer, made it all worthwhile. “You don’t have a side of the story,” Lisa told her without batting a lash. “Let me tell you why. He’s been one of our most important customers for seven years.” I’ve gotta say, I quite like this version of Ms. Vanderpump. She is as icy and professional as Sonja Morgan is aimless and flopsy.